By Atilio Borón on February 12, 2024
Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) of Venezuela announced on Friday that the disqualification of opposition candidate María Corina Machado, for 15 years was ratified. Photo: Gaby Oraa.
There is a gesture that clearly shows that senility is not only a problem of President Joe Biden but of the empire as a whole. A few days ago, the United States Government announced new sanctions against its Venezuelan counterpart after the decision of the Supreme Court of Justice to ratify the disqualification of Mrs. María Corina Machado to run as a candidate in the next presidential elections.
It was enough for the news to become known for the media sewer, the one that completely silences the ongoing genocide in Gaza or the massacres of Dina Boluarte in Peru, to immediately shake its intestines and start launching all kinds of infamous accusations against the Bolivarian Government. “Proscription, exclusion, persecution!” they shout to the four winds encouraged from Washington. What these neo-colonial spokes people do not say is that María Corina Machada is being judged by a legislation that is practically a carbon copy of the U.S. one. According to the latter, condensed in 18 U.S. Code § 2381, it is established that “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, takes up arms against the Government of the United States and/or its armed forces; or adheres to its enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, and offers financial, logistical or any other form of support to a country or organization at war with the United States. Whoever commits this offense shall be charged with treason and shall suffer the death penalty, or imprisonment and fine, and disqualification from holding any office in the United States.”
According to U.S. jurisprudence, the crime is proven when someone committed an overt act against the U.S. Government (a war, aiding an enemy government or organization, etc.) and participated in any form of rebellion or seditious conspiracy against it.
Having said the above, it is more than evident that if Mrs. Machado had been a citizen of the United States and had acted as she has been doing in Venezuela for some twenty years, she would have been arrested, prosecuted and convicted by the U.S. authorities. Machado publicly met with at least one U.S. president, George W. Bush (Jr.), who received her in the Oval Office on May 31, 2005, in a private meeting that was not only protocol because it lasted a little more than 50 minutes. It is supposed that the subject of the conversation was to request help to overthrow the constitutional government of President Hugo Chávez Frías on the eve of the crucial Summit of the Americas that was to meet in November of that year where the White House expected the approval of the FTAA.
To put an end to Chávez’s charismatic leadership was decisive for the success of these evil designs. And Machado was there, in addition to countless meetings she held with other front line officials of successive U.S. administrations, seeking the way to achieve that goal.
In March 2014, coinciding with the first of the bloody “guarimbas” organized by the Venezuelan right wing, Machado appeared on the international scene as an unusual “alternate ambassador” of Panama at the session of the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States, using that platform to attack the government of President Nicolás Maduro. Machado was at that time a member of the National Assembly of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and in a gross act of treason she openly requested before the Permanent Council of the OAS that said organization should order a foreign military intervention to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro. All this while the gangsters of the guarimbas indiscriminately murdered indiscriminately whoever had the appearance of being a Chavista, in not a few cases burned alive. It should be recalled that in 2017, the guarimbas reappeared with the full support of the Venezuelan right wing and their U.S. principals, without Machado condemning in the least their aberrant crimes against the population. On the contrary, throughout these years she never ceased to request the intervention of foreign forces to put an end to the legitimate government of her country.
It should not be forgotten that throughout so many years this “patriotic” Venezuelan leader tirelessly advocated before the governments of the United States and the European Union for the imposition of harsh economic sanctions and sanctions of all kinds against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Currently, this country is the victim of 930 unilateral coercive measures (ICM) that have affected all areas of economic activity and have caused severe hardship to the Venezuelan population as a whole. In short, we are facing a clear case of treason that has been treated with surprising benignity by the Chavista government. In 2005 Machado was tried for her signature of the “Carmona decree” that validated the coup d’état in Venezuela on April 10, 2002. She was also tried for conspiracy due to the fact that an NGO she created and directed received a subsidy of 53 thousand dollars from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), financed by the US Congress. For both charges she was sentenced to 28 years in prison, but was amnestied by then President Hugo Chávez. In no other country could Machado have continued doing politics as she has done in Venezuela until today. In most European countries she would have been put in prison serving long sentences, and the same would have happened in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru or any other country in the region.
On the other hand, it should be remembered that these were not just words. Her attack against her own country had concrete effects that caused great damage. The fact that María Corina Machado and the “self-proclaimed president” Juan Guaidó handed over to foreign hands companies and assets of the Venezuelan people such as: CITGO, in the United States; Monómeros, the largest fertilizer manufacturer, in Colombia; both characters were also accomplices of the seizure of 31 tons of gold by the United Kingdom valued at almost two billion dollars and also of the blockade of financial assets arranged by Washington and its European lackeys, cannot be avoided. Conservative estimates of the economic damages caused by Machado and Guaidó against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela amount to some 140 billion US dollars. Despite this, she claims impunity.
With this background in view, María Corina Machado had already been disqualified from holding public office for a period of 15 years, starting in 2015, as stated in the opinion of the Comptroller General of the Republic. In other words, there is nothing new, since she has already been disqualified for 9 years. It is not that she is being condemned now. It was already done in 2015, and it is res judicata. The decision taken and announced by the Venezuelan Supreme Court of Justice is not her disqualification, but simply the ratification of a decision taken 9 years ago.
Nevertheless, the right wing and the spokespersons of the empire have set her up as a sort of patriotic Joan of Arc when in fact she is a scandalous agent of the empire and an accomplice of the criminal plundering perpetrated against her own country and one of the most important mentors of the plan to overthrow the legitimate government of Nicolás Maduro, and take Venezuela back to the nefarious times of the Fourth Republic. That is the true portrait of the “heroine” or the “freedom fighter” presented by the empire’s media and the U.S. government itself, which is now redoubling its sanctions against the people and government of Venezuela.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English